Congratulations to Pitto for winning round 1 of the competition with his Impossible Victhorse!

Please scroll down to the third post, if you don't need a detailed run-down.

Impossible Victhorse

Game design: 26/35The game makes solid effort to incorporate the theme into its setting, and probably does the best from all the entries, in that very aspect alone. It's a platform game played in a sort of dystopian world, where FreeBASIC is outlawed and its keywords hidden and encrypted in cryptographed mainframes by Darkistra, a demented ruler of fictional Codingland. Daristra being an evil pupil of Edsger Dijkstra, so the story is mainly inspired by Dijkstra's scanthing words on BASIC most of us are very familiar with. You play Victor, obviously modeled around the image of the real life creator of FreeBASIC, André Victor Vicentini, as the only person who can free the forbidded language. A lot was done to make the world feel menacing and anti-FreeBASIC in small details. Also, the addition of a hologram assistant that pops out here and there helps to flesh out the setting. Where the game gets negative points is the fact little of this is incorporated in the very gameplay, reduced probably to only one feature (the FB horse). Also in the first mentioned aspect, the game does leave much room for improvements, like more NPCs, maybe some dialogues with enemy characters, and a more thematically compeling ending.

Gameplay: 11/15Impossible Victhorse is a solid platform game, but does feel iffy in more than one aspect. The platforming feels more tricky than it should, and this could be related to some features that alone might not be problematic. Like sliding of platform edges and having to press up again to activate a consecutive jump, which together result in many frustrating moments. Also, the fighting part of the gameplay doesn't feel fully developed, and appears much less challenging and fun than the platforming, despite the fact that platforming part was often frustrating to me. Since there is no any collision between you and enemies that effects player's movement, either by stopping you or pushing you out, in combination with a too simplistic AI that just lunges at your position, a lot of interaction with the enemies boils down to rather one-sided and clunky confrontations. Also the level design is not terribly inspiring and varied, and Pitto seems to have ran of ideas there too soon. Overall, it's fun to play and beat, but leaves much to be desired for.

Progression: 4/6The game does feature a solid amount of content spread over 9 levels. It introduces new features and enemies with good pacing, but fails to do the maximum to translate that to the very experience of playing the game. Impossible Victhorse doesn't seem to succeed to exploit these new features as one expects them to be exploited, the first time they are interacted with.

Replay Value: 4/6Despite my previous criticism, the engine is quite robust and smooth, and makes the game fun to experience multiple times. A highscore table with preset scores helps increase the replayability, although the top scores are not too challenging to beat. The lack of secrets, easter eggs (as far as I know) and achievements, which is a feature constantly milked nowadays but nevertheless makes sense, definitely doesn't help Impossible Victhorse to motivate you to play it again after beating it.

Graphics: 5/7I'm quite impressed by the design and consistency of Pitto's pixel art. While being far from sophisticated, it's very well designed, clear, effective and coherent. It really looks like a proffesional game from the early 90ies, almost to a point. Not perfect, I know, but close to something being done by someone in full control of his skill. If I was Pitto, I would be definitely encouraged by the work delivered in this game to hone this skillset in the future. I think there is genuine talent to be found here. Negative points really come down to penalizing lack of more content and sophistication in the work, and incoherent presentation here and there.

Sound/music: 6/7The game features very good original sounds effects, and unoriginal MOD tracks, that are kind of a hit and miss. Standard fare here. Separate music/sfx volume level would be a plus.

Personal likeness: 5/6I probably liked this specific entry the most, mostly because it was the biggest surprise of the competition, at least to me personally. Most other entries ended up being what I expected from those developers, but I didn't know what Pitto was capable off, and his work surprised me in very a positive way. Definitely a very enjoyable, stylish short platformer, and a game with a character. I only wish Pitto made a home run with a boss battle or something more effective for the finale. All in all, looking forward to his future game dev endevours.

Game design: 21/35Love Letter to FreeBasic (chan!) also makes a solid hommage to the compiler, by making FreeBASIC itself an object of affection to be defended from unwanted woers. It's a single screen action game, where you basically defend the person in center (FreeBASIC chan) from the invading characters using two modes of attack. The game gives a nice rundown of ChangeV's game dev history in BASIC, by featuring characters from his old games, both QB and FB, as boss characters. It's all very cute, funny and entertaining. Still, gameplay is barely explored with the theme. It just works on a very simplistic surface level for a higher score to be warranted in this category, not that I don't appreciate the level of hommage it delivers.

Gameplay: 10/15In its core, this is a very fun and entertaining gameplay. The main character is very responsive, the game is perfectly paced, it features nice "sliding off" collision, it fully delivers as a game engine. It feels like an endless score driven game, but it was fun to discover it actually features an ending. There is a nice progression to the difficulty, with each new boss ushering a more frantic wave of enemies. What works against the game is maybe an unfortunate combination of few gameplay elements, like the large sprites against a single screen playfield, together with the feature of enemies remaining on the screen after being killed, that make it maybe too frantic and constrained. Also, quite few elements of the game feel more like glitches than features, like dead characters as well as your hero cycling through walking animation while standing/dead, for which I'm pretty sure are bugs. If not, I think they are unfortunate design decisions. I admire how much the game pushed me to try harder, until finishing it, after some 8 attempts of so. And the ending is quite rewarding to watch. All in all, excellent work, but rather limited in content and scope.

Progression: 3/6The game does feature "bosses", and there is a nice increase in difficulty, but the bosses themselves really don't introduce anything new, and serve more as goal posts toward the game ending. And almost all the content is recycled through the game, except the bosses. Anyway, I'm not saying any of this is bad, but this category servers to "award" entries that feature more depth and content than the other, so I need to "penalize" this aspect of Love Letter to FreeBasic (chan!).

Replay Value: 3/6Once you beat the game, it's hard you'll be pressed to play it more than once. Perhaps if you had someone to compete with for the high score. It is however very addictive to play until you beat it, and overall, provides a rewarding experience.

Graphics: 5/7It's the usual excellent work by JawsV. Everything is really well done, except maybe the background which looks a bit uninspired. The sprites themselves, Nintendo/Pokemon inspired, are quite vibrant and colorful, well animated, especially ChangeV flipping around. The presentation overall feels a bit lacking and rushed, so I think some graphical segments of the game were left our of the production pipeline because of the deadline. Also, the overall amount of content in the game is really limited, so any higher score would be ignoring this fact. But besides that, it's great work. I really don't know why they don't embark on a more ambitious project. They got the chops.

Sound/music: 6/7The game feels very tight in this department. Excellent, pleasent sounding sfx, and briliantly picked music track for the theme. Again, the limited amount of sound content needs to be taken into consideration during scoring.

Personal likeness: 5/6This game really took me by surprise once I digged a bit deeper. Initially, the glithes and odd choice to keep the enemies on the screen after they are killed was a bit off putting, but giving the game a second play really turned me to its excellent gameplay and funny, lighthearted atmosphere, which really carried me until I was able to beat it. A really, really lovely mini-game.

Game design: 17/35This game kinda stumbles in dealing with the main theme. Storywise, it deals with FreeBASIC superficially, by name only, which seems more plugged in than needed, and gameplay-wise, only graphically, where you shoot at enemies with letters going F->R->E->E->B->A->S->I->C, and turn parts of enemies from C+/PHYTON sprites into FreeBASIC sprites. It is however a cool mini-game featuring a nice throwback to classic games like Invaders, Centipede, and just misc rehashes of some classic genres. But if you can completely divorce the game from the theme by removing two or three sprites within the game and few references to FreeBASIC in intro/outro, this needs to be reflected in the score.

Gameplay: 10/15I'm split regarding scoring this game. On one hand, it offers a really challenging but beatable experience, which on the other hand, is quite frustrating, too often depends on luck, with randomization effecting too much on your chance to win. It basically starts in an "overworld" which is some professor's house, and you need to shoot at these floating programs going around to send them back into various electronic devices in the house. Once they are in a specific device in the house, you can enter that device to play a game, in order to "cure" the trapped program (turn its body into FB blocks instead of C+/PHYTON blocks in most cases). Each device respresent a type of game, and once you finish one level of it, you progress to the next once you enter a same type of device (some feature two levels, some three, some four). There is also a surprise level at the end, and a solid outro. Finishing all levels allows you to play bonus level outside the main game, which is a nice example of unlockable content. Also, you can practice every level you reach in the main game in the previously mentioned practice/bonus mode. So despite having all proper ingedients, I'm disappointed more care was not given to actually designing levels that always play the same, or at least, not make randomization a deal breaker for wining or loosing. So the game actually lost points for me the second time I went back to it (succesful finished it after some 3 attempts or so), by bringing my attention to these flaws with randomization, which were missed during the first play session.

Progression: 5/6There is definitely a solid amount of varied content in the game, that is unlocked with nice pace, with new content at the very end, and bonus levels you can experience afterwards.

Replay Value: 4/6The game's feature that allows you to replay levels for a higher score, as well as bonus levels, all with individual saveable high score tables are a cool touch. But all this content that would give the game a perfect score in this department otherwise, is tarnished by the beforehand mentioned luck factor that influences each play and kind of makes any desire to beat any score, except on early levels, somewhat unrewarding.

Graphics: 4/7Standard fare by ssjx here, perhaps slightly better than some other effors of his. The way most of levels inside of the devices are graphically conceptualized is rather effective and interesting, and a consciencious effort was made to make that part of the game notably different that the main "overworld". Also, both intro and the outro are rewarding to see, and are cool in their own unique way.

Sound/music: 4/7Again, just solid effort, with nothing standing out or being unpleasent. It's interesting to note that the music tracks were generated by cgMusic, a program I was unaware of, because the tracks fit the game quite well. Sounds effects are somewhat scarce, though.

Personal likeness: 3/6Initially, this was a solid 4 or even 5 for me, but the replay made me dislike the game's randomization quite a bit, and I just couldn't get passt it. I appreciate all the varied content within the game. It's perhaps the most varied entry of all, both from the gameplay and graphics angle, but the game fails to capitalize on that. It is definitely one of ssjx's better effors, and worth being played, but I'm not sure how much rewarding is to persist with it. But I personally didn't consider finishing it a waste of time. My time was awarded in that sense. I enjoyed it for the first time round.

Game design: 10/35This is a simple single screen shooter where you are a FB object shooting at C+ objects, and this is were the implementation of the competition theme starts and finishes. Despite the simplistic concept, I think more could have been done for the theme, for example, by unlockable "FreeBASIC cameos" after certain amount of levels or something similar. With all this in mind, this game doesn't warrant a higher score in this cateogory.

Gameplay: 7/15The game features solid gameplay mechanics. You are a movable object (a tank?) in a single screen, walled playfield, and you have a goal to destroy all enemies in the level before a timer expires by shooting projectiles at them, as well as avoiding collision. It's level-based, and each level introduces more enemies. It's playable, relatively fun, but all too rudimentary for a higher score. Also, it feels plagued by randomization a bit, where success, to some extent, depends on it.

Progression: 2/6The game is very basic, and basically all discovery ends with completing level one.

Replay Value: 2/6Well, the initial high score is set up rather high, so to some extent, the game is replayable in that sense, as well as trying to beat someone else's high score. Only, the amount of varied content and depth is so low, it's hard to stick with this game more than an hour.

Graphics: 2/7The game's ASCII graphics is quite elegantly executed, and I really like how the main title was done. Only, the in-game graphics are really basic and limited in content, and there is little to "award" in this category.

"Things like Basic and Free Basic provide much-needed therapy and a return to sanity and a correct appreciation of people. The arrogant folk really hate a word like 'Basic' - fine, and good riddance." ~ pragmatist

Game design: 8/35This is just a Carom Billiards game with few textures featuring FreeBASIC symbols. It abandons any attempt to introduce other references to FreeBASIC. For example, a speed run mode that would unlock a screenshot from a FreeBASIC game each time you finish a round or something. Options were there, in my opinion.

Gameplay: 7/15It's a 3D Carom Billiards game that allows PVP and PVC modes, with solid AIs. The menus, presentation and controls feel a bit underdeveloped overall, and the could definitely use more single player modes, like speed runs or stuff like that.

Progression: 1/6None. Single play based game.

Replay Value: 2/6Hard to score. I think the controls and low user-friendliness diminish how attractive this is to play against other computer Carom Billiard games.

Graphics: 2/7Simplistic, but get's the job done.

Sound/music: 2/7Few appropriate sounds effects that get the job done.

Personal likeness: 2/6This is a solidly executed Carom Billiards game, but lacks polish and ambition for a higher score.

Game design: 29/35FB Shooter Force 2019 convincingly succeeds to incorporate the theme in all the game core elements, from the story, art design to very gameplay. It's a side scrolling shooter set in a fictional universe where computer languages are sort of waring civilizations. You play a FB drone pilot, which sort of projects a horse hologram around itself. It's a clever idea to have an actual FB horse running around in space, but not being exactly that. The game features 4 levels with boss battles, each level based around a programming language, like Pascalia or Pythonia. Enemies represent certain features of the languages, like flying semicolons and cheetahs. Also, the background sometimes reflects this as well, like Java in level 3. The gameplay is heavily based on collecting and swapping powerups, which are FB keywords, and either a direct translation of the word, or its functionality in FreeBASIC are somehow reflected in the game. Being that CLS destroying everything on the screen, POINT giving you extra points, SHORT being a strong short range weapon, RND randomazing your weapons' pallette, the list goes on. FB Shooter Force 2019 really illustrated what was expected from an entry in this competition to deliver. Negative points go down to this original idea not fully developed and fleshed out, especially with the design of enemies, being that gameplay-wise, or being that graphically. No attempt was done to try to translate other language features into gameplay mechanics of either enemies of bosses, while I think there was room for that.

Gameplay: 11/15It's another entry that has many elements that call for a higher score, but also contain flaws that diminish the positives. It feels like a shooter where a lot of effort was invested into designing interesting powerups, while on the other hand it contains a relatively small range of similarly behaving enemies, all against levels/missions that run in average 5 minutes too long. Also, level bosses fail to introduce anything new of note, and mostly rehash the original concept over and over. So it's a game that plays fun, the basic engine does a god job to make the game feel enjoyable, but it simply doesn't feature enough varied content to warrant its lenght. This in combination with somewhat intermediate difficulty, makes it a frustrating experience, forcing you to clog through overlong levels just to reach again the part where you failed last time, with dubious hope of success this time around. I think dropping out extra lives and continue powerups and adding level codes would be a better solution, against this length of missions. Two player mode is a plus, but it doesn't make much substantial difference.

Progression: 4/6Again, a category of the game featuring conflicting qualities. The length of the game and overall amount of different content is commendable, but also, the parts where the content feels repeated and padded is not to be ignored.

Replay Value: 3/6Due the game being padded in my opinion, you'll be hardly pressed to play it again after you beat it, and I also fear that if you die once or twice in the last section of the game, especially on final boss, the daunting length you have to strench just to reach that part of the game might just destroy your will to try more than once. Two player mode add certain replaybility, if you have someone to play it with, but not much.

Graphics: 4/7Somewhat disappointed with the delivered in this category. The game is sort of a mish-mash of average and below average graphics, but in my opinion, it suffers more from uninspired design, especially as the game moves forward, than the very quality of graphics. On the top of that, a sort of gloomy look of the entire palette makes the game look rather dull and crude.

Sound/music: 4/7A lot of original content here. While the sound effects really do a good job, the music tracks somehow fall flat, and don't help to elevate the game above the flaws in other departments. Some things that could easily be improved are speech sounds for picking up powerups.

Personal likeness: 4/6I was quite captivated with the game initially, and meeting and beating the first boss was rather exhilirating. Sadly, the more I progressed, the more I witnessed the lack of inspiration, and the initial score that was maybe 5, started more and more to look like a 4, borderline 3. It's a solid side scrolling shooter, a really cool hommage to FreeBASIC, but it's simply a game that fails to deliver on its promises and remains just average. It could definitely be retooled, but since it was created for such a niche purpose, I'm not sure how much Landeel is interested in revisting some weaker aspects of it, primarily boss designs and length.

Game design: 19/35The Secret Gallery does a similar thing like ChangeV's A Love Letter To FreeBASIC (chan!), but even to a smaller extent. It's basically a puzzle platformer, where you wander around a gallery of sorts, and discover exhibits that feature past creations of the developers. While in ChangeV's entry there is at least some interactivity regarding these throwbacks to history, and some concrete story, The Secret Gallery really doesn't go any further from featuring elements of hommage as mere passive exhibits.

Gameplay: 10/15While the engine the game features is very smooth and robusts, and the main game mechanic really ingenious, this is not translated very succesfully to the delivered product. I assume it was mainly due the lack of time. Not sure if revealing the game mechanics is sort of a spoiler, so I won't go into much detail, but it's starts once you acquire a photocamera. This mechanic opens the game to a wide range of challenging puzzles, and the game does a solid work in that area. What, however, bogged me down, was somewhat sketchy level design after few initial puzzles, that doesn't direct you to solve puzzles, and overall introduce you to areas that feel rather daunting to explore. In my opinion the game had to feature more rooms you needed to "solve" to advance further. This simply disappears after like 30 % of the game. This brings me to another qualm I have regarding this game. It's the lack of retry feature of sorts, that would prevent you to put yourself in unsolvable situations (which otherwise force you to backtrack), as well as allow you to get back to areas you missed by accident. Anyway, I'm sorry this excellent idea failed to be translated better for this competition, but I would warmly recommend Zamaster to remix this concept for a new game, because this concept has real commercial potential.

Progression: 4/6The game feels rather compelling in its initial phase, once you are discovering the mechanics and new features, but too soon turns rather stale and repetetive, and I was kind of disappointed how little varied content it featured, combined with somewhat confusing level design in its second half.

Replay Value: 5/6The goal of the game is to discover as much exibits possible, and the game does a good job in featuring many hidden areas, and they are tallied up at the very end. So in this aspect the game provides enough value to be replayed.

Graphics: 6/7The graphics are excellent, and could pass for a commercial product. Only, there is way too little of it to feel satisfactory.

Sound/music: 5/7Nothing especially to complain regarding sounds and music, besides the fact that they are rather minimal, and somewhat uninspired.

Personal likeness: 4/6Was much more excited with this game for its initial third, until the uninspiried level design and realization the game won't introduce anything new got to me. It just felt something that lacked few more weeks of production time to be fleshed out, although I think it demands more substantial content, like different "mini-game" subsections, to really make the game feel alive. The setting really gets boring too fast.

Game design: 17/35While the game features an interesting, almost a non-antropomorphic cosmic story, all the references to BASIC again, feel plugged in, and could easily be replaced by simply other references. Nothing in the gameplay feels like it's really connected to BASIC in any way, besides by mere name. It's basically a multiplayer RTS, akin to Command and Conquer, where you construct various facilities and build a fighting force on a top down map, while advancing through programming ages, from Assembly to FreeBASIC.

Gameplay: 8/15I'm not sure what to think of BASIC Warfare in its current form. I feel it's a game that seriously lacks gameplay polish. I feel the overall control scheme is rather cumbersome, and doesn't marry well with the current size of game objects. In one play my and CPU opponent buildings began to overlap, and I failed to make out what putting a turret around my building did, if anything. And CPU opponents are useless. This leaves you to play multiplayer matches, where I feel experience with the game controls and knowledge of gameplay specifics heavily trumps over any strategy. Switching controled units is just clunky, where it doesn't change your POV, but makes the selected unit travel first to the current position of the last selected unit. It's too wierd in to many aspects. A myriad of bugs doesn't help it either.

Progression: 4/6The game feels like it has a nice pace, and building up you base and units doesn't feel tedious or padded. Only, the moment you encounter any enemy presence the game begins to run into problems here.

Replay Value: 5/6I'm not sure what to give this game in this category. Being a multiplayer game, it's a completely different beast than a single player one, and while it could basically be played endlessly, you depend fully on having competetive opponents ready to play with you, at your convinience.

Graphics: 6/7BASIC Warfare showcase really unique and effective graphics, mixing some wireframe 3D in the intro, and a rather original looking top down mock ASCII graphics with a mock 3D DOF effect. Very comendable design here.

Personal likeness: 3/6While I immensely appreciate the potential BASIC Warfare showcases, it just failed to be fun for me in its current form, and is barely playable against a CPU opponent. With a single player mode and an evolving story, I can see this being an indie object of interest.

"Things like Basic and Free Basic provide much-needed therapy and a return to sanity and a correct appreciation of people. The arrogant folk really hate a word like 'Basic' - fine, and good riddance." ~ pragmatist

This was probably one of the most frustrating competitions to score. Most contenders for the top places had conflicting qualities and flaws in most of categories, so settling for a final score felt more complicated than it should.

It was difficult to discover that none of the entries in my opinion "nailed it", and each was crippled in one or more aspects. In other words, there were just too many flaws I had to bring up, being that my nature, while I didn't feel quite comfortable doing that, having in mind the intention and theme of the competition. I hope there won’t be any hard feelings.

It was comforting to see that community votes align with my scores pretty well, though.

Overall, it was awesome to see so many entries, and so many well rounded, despite being not fully successful. A record number of entries for sure and I appreciate everyone who took the time to participate, in any capacity. I really wasn't frustrated with games. More how to form my opinion on them.

"Things like Basic and Free Basic provide much-needed therapy and a return to sanity and a correct appreciation of people. The arrogant folk really hate a word like 'Basic' - fine, and good riddance." ~ pragmatist

Congratulations to all contenders for their effort, and specially to Pitto for making such an amazing game.It was pretty fun to develop FB Shooter Force, and it helped me improve my engine and my skills for my next games.Thanks to Lachie for organizing this and pushing us to do our best. Your feedback is very valuable. Thank you!

"Things like Basic and Free Basic provide much-needed therapy and a return to sanity and a correct appreciation of people. The arrogant folk really hate a word like 'Basic' - fine, and good riddance." ~ pragmatist